Venice (part IV)

Titian
has painted universal life. When he listens to its voices, one would say that
he was indifferent. They all enter into him with equal rights; the bodies of
children, the flesh of women, virile faces, gorgeous or sober costumes,
architectures, the earth with its trees and its flowers, the sea, the sky, and
all the wandering atoms which make it impossible for the sea and the sky to
cease combining their forces. Creative enthusiasm raises him to such a height
that his serenity does not desert him even when this entire world, assimilated
and recreated in a new order, issues from him in waves continually increasing
in length and breadth. He organizes his world into symphonies in which
everything that is human resounds in uninterrupted echoes through everything
that lives with an instinctive and obscure life, where everything that is
material penetrates the human forms and fuses with them for eternity.

In
Venice one no longer finds detached edges in the diamond of the atmosphere,
there are no more of those imperious lines cutting out the hills and the graded
terraces against the sky. There is nothing but the space in which objects
tremble, combine, and become dissociated; a world of reflections, modified,
inverted, suppressed, or renewed repeatedly by the hours of the day and by the
seasons; it is an animated opal in which the iridescence of the light, seen
through watery vapor, forbids the defining of colors and lights and causes the
very forms to appear like transitory objects which are continually coming forth
from matter in movement only to return into it and be merged with it before
issuing forth again. On the palaces, red-brown or purple, or covered with a
crust of musty gold, all the colors of the prism are awakened, are effaced,
come to light again, and prolong themselves as if drawn out in thick strokes,
to render obscure the quivering contours of stones in the dull water in which
the fermentation of organic matter caused phosphorescences to roll. The mirror
of the sea casts its reflections into the vapors that arise from it under the
downpour of light, and when these vapors pass in clouds over the glistening
canals, the sky throws back thick shadows upon them and reflects the airy
phantom of the waters in which the choppiness of the waves mingles the
turquoise and the vermilion, the greens, the golden yellows, the reds, and the
oranges of the facades decorated with flags and of the processions of gondolas.

All the
painting of Titian is here, and after it all the painting of Venice, and after
the painting of Venice all the painting that has life, which sees colors
penetrating one another, reflections playing upon surfaces, transparent shadows
taking on color—painting in which no tone is ever repeated in the same manner,
but dominates by discreetly reminding one of itself, thereby awakening in the
eye the vibration of neighboring hues, the luminous life of the world, creating
a spontaneous symphony not one beat of which will be born of matter without our
being able to discover the cause of it and to seek its effect in the whole of
its extent. Doubtless, the discipline gained from the work of Mantegna, later
on the influence of Rome, and above all the sensuality which led them
necessarily to discover form, the form full and circular which we invariably
discover at the conclusion of an investigation into plastics, caused the
Venetian painters to see everything gravitating around the volumes which alone
are capable of giving us a durable and solid image of the world of our senses.
But the Venetians never attained sculptural expression, and Sansovino, their
sculptor, who came, however, from Florence, even developed among them a
conception of form which, in its shading, vagueness, and grandeur approached
that of their painting. Titian always stops at the instant when, at the edges
of the mass that turns before him to vanish in the distant plains, he observes
the quivering caress of the atmosphere which, by the gradation of its values,
unifies the mass with the volumes of the forests, the clouds, the mountains
perceived in the distance. Line has disappeared. The spots of color graded down
evoke form sufficiently for it to participate in the life of all space. So the
continuity which gives life to the work is no longer found in that inner
instinct for social solidarity which, for the artists of the Middle Ages, held
things together by invisible bonds; neither is it found in the intellectual
arabesque which defined this unity for the mind rather than for the senses: it
is in the mutual dependence of all the elements of the world, the forms, the
lines, the colors, and the air that unites them; and if, among the Venetians,
the moral sentiment seems to efface itself from life, it is to allow the rise,
in an irresistible explosion, of the sensual sentiment of the whole body of
nature which Christianity had forgotten. Titian not only prevented the original
sin of breaking through the symbolic frontiers within which Michael Angelo had
inclosed it once more, but, by bringing about a more perfect unity in the
infinite complexity of all the relationships whose logical interweaving makes a
harmonious and living universe, he finished the work of Masaccio, completed
that of Bellini, consecrated that of Giorgione, and, before Rabelais, before
Shakespeare, before Rubens, before Velasquez and Rembrandt, and long before the
German musicians, he announced the modern spirit. He created the symphony. He
is the father of painting.

The
aristocratic nature inherited from his noble ancestors had been tempered by the
elementary force of the country where he was born, at the foot of the Tyrolean
Alps, among the lakes and the beech forests above which rises the rampart of
the pink Dolomite peaks. Cima da Conegliano had had before his eyes the same
mountain landscapes, the same transparent skies, and the blue waters in which
sleep the silhouettes of the fortified castles, and when he painted the
delicate altar pictures whose clearly defined figures recall his master
Giovanni Bellini less than they do Mantegna, he supplied from his own mind
scarcely more than the subtle frame, aerial and poetic, which he purposed to
give them. Titian, who was less than twenty years younger, certainly knew him
and studied him, and sought in his work the confirmation of his own
presentiments. Later on, whenever he left Venice-and he departed frequently,
especially after the descent of Charles the Fifth upon Italy—he carried with
him his sense of space trembling from molecular vibration, and when, on his
travels, he found himself among lakes. woods, and plains sown with low cottages
and clusters of green oaks, he felt the confused poetry of the earth as it had
never been felt before.

Thenceforward,
space enveloped with its waves the pagan poems with which he was overflowing;
they expanded in great dazzling shapes of coppery flame, in fruits that rolled
from baskets amid the clang of tambourines and cymbals during the stormy
afternoons when Dionysius and his train of nude fauns and bacchantes burst
forth with a great clamor from thick woodlands. The men of those times, having
escaped from the Christian world, possessed such reserves of love that they
could yield to their passions without haste, without turning back, without loss
of vigor, with the peaceful certitude of nature's elements. While the
bacchanale roars and voluptuousness mingles its panting breath with the cry of
the panthers, the earth breathes like a beast. The skies are full of
low-hanging clouds charged with lightning; blue vapors arise like a sweat; a
subterranean sap circulates through the soil, scatters white foam on the
surface of the brooks, and swells the black thickets where nude men and women,
clasped in each other's arms, glow like red gold. But it is only with
Tintoretto that the human drama will resound to the borders of the thunderous
sky in tragic clouds and purple lightning. Here space is unconscious whether
its storms strain the nerves of men and women; the men and women are unaware of
the fact that they are participating in the heedless symphonies in which the
violence of the primitive instincts is only one note in the sound from the dark
thickets, in the murmur of the fountains, in the breaths of hot air that drive
along the clouds, in the distant lowing of the herds that descend the sloping
meadows, and in the great silence of the plains that vanish in the vapor of the
summer days.

The
beautiful mature bodies of the Venetian courtesans were displayed before him on
broad beds, wearing only a necklace about their throats, and holding a tuft of
roses in the hollow of their hands, or they lay under the trees before a
kneeling faun; and the beautiful, mature bodies glowed with the same serenity
that he had found in the earth. They were waiting. Love was for them a thing
accepted unaffectedly, filled with a tranquil intoxication, without disquietude
or remorse. Their eyes were the calm eyes of animals, in which swim the russet
reflections of their heavy hair and of the space gathering around them which envelops
them in amber. Their breasts rose and fell slowly, their bellies had waves of
muscles which merge in the angle of shadow formed by the broad thighs as they
come together. With his brush Titian amassed the heavy atmosphere in order to
knead it with the substance of the soil, the pulp of the fruits, and the sap of
the oaks. And with it all he mingled that winelike purple dipped in gold, which
is like a triumphal background for the Venetian apotheosis, which weighs on the
shoulders of the bishops in the penumbra flaming within the churches, which
dyes the robes of the Doges, unfurls itself from the top of masts and balconies
and floats behind the gondolas, which shimmers on facades, stains the walls and
floors in the halls of the Ducal Palace with blood as if it were rising through
the pores of the stone dungeons below where the Council of Ten caused its
decrees to be executed, fills the twilights, trembles in the reflections of the
lanterns at the evening water-festivals, and which the sails of the ships trail
over the sea.

When
Titian abandoned that impassive sensual idealism which was the dominating force
of his activity, he discovered in the somber purple, lit up by golden spangles,
and tempered by fire and sulphur, a powerful and tragic atmosphere, enabling
him to enter the human drama with the decision and vigor of which only a great
spirit is capable, a spirit which continued to grow up to his hundredth year.
It is that bloody light shed by the flickering torches which brings out of the
shadow, where the executioners torture Him, that terrible "Christ Crowned
with Thorns," painted, as was the "Pieta," one of the most
melancholy and human works in the history of painting, when he was more than
ninety-five—a painting in which there was a premonition of the genius of
Rembrandt. It is this bloody light which rises with the dawn and streaks the
black iron armor of Charles the Fifth as he comes forth from a black wood, his
livid countenance touched by red reflections as he bestrides a black horse
caparisoned with red—a horrible symphony of murder, a painting of night and of
blood.

Thus
there were two directions to his nature which parted at the common center of
his limitless receptivity and of his acceptance of life; to organize themselves
into vast sensual poems, or to scrutinize the moral world with a cruelty as
impassable as his lyricism had seemed. There are no portraits, in Italy or
elsewhere, which surpass his. They have that power of defining character which
caused the Florentines—Donatello, Andrea del Castagno, Verrocchio, Ghirlandajo,
Filippi Lippi, Botticelli at times, and even Benvenuto—to produce such terrible
effigies, concentrated, nervous, frenzied, and cut out in the mold of passion.
Only, these are draped with decorative fullness and searched out with a
tranquil penetration unknown to Florence. The fever that consumed her painters
no longer exists in Titian. He can paint with a sincerity so uncompromising
that it leaves to the Caesars and to the popes their malformed skulls, their
atrophied masks, their jaws of beasts, and their hideous and low mien; he can
describe those black-garbed silhouettes, those muscular hands that clutch the
hilts of swords, and those pale countenances with haggard eyes, all those
violent men made for murder as women are made for love. It is the period in
which the Condottiere holds Italy in
his grasp, when Machiavelli writes The
Prince. Titian's heads summarize all Italy, from the ferocious portraits of
Antonello da Messina who had brought to Venice the oil painting of the
Flemings, and from the tightly drawn faces of Giovanni Bellini to the broad,
somewhat soft effigies of that fine painter Paris Bordone, and to the great
figures of the Doges which momentarily arrested the disordered, gorgeous, and
brutal vision of Tintoretto.